In 3ds max, my file takes 3 minutes and 42 seconds to render on my colleges computers, which are i7 920 cpu's, on my computer at home it takes 5 minutes and 28 seconds on a i7 930 cpu. why is mine slower? the only real difference between mine and theirs is that i have 3gb of ddr3 triple channel ram and they have 6gb of triple channel ram, but my file is tiny so i would NOT need alot of ram, plus ive saw benchmarks were the difference between rendering with 3gb of ram and 6 gb of ram is 0! so that cant be the problem i think our graphic cards are similar, plus, when rendering it uses the cpu anyway, not gpu.

Does the motherboard automatically overclock the college's computers? I know some that do.

It could be the RAM though, as rendering is very CPU/RAM dependent, and if more information can be stored in the RAM and not retrieved, it could make a difference.
It really depends on the quality of the settings you have set.

Yeah, like I said, depending on settings, even 4GB's of RAM can be used up, because polygons are increased rapidly during render time, and then you have the calculations stored based on light bouncing off a surface. Materials that are more complex are obviously going to have to have more light bounces per pixel. Then you've got to throw in the fact that each pixel is anti-aliased a set number of times.

Trust me when I say RAM does matter.

Rendering a pretty basic scene comprising of around 3,000,000 polygons a couple of years back, I used up a lot more than my 3GB's RAM, even though it ran in the view-port perfectly fine.
I had to render in parts since it wasn't taking it.

It also depends on the resolution you are rendering at.

What I suggest you do, is set a render region, and render a given number of pixels, like say 640x640 and then render on each machine. You'll find the speed, if I'm right, will then be the same.
Or just render a full frame at a lower resolution, and check on each machine.

Then scale the resolution up, until you start noticing a difference between the two.

i have, ive rendered at different resolutions on both of the pcs, mine, and theirs, and they still render about 30% faster or so, the polys in my scene is only 6500, so i dont think ram is the issue here,